Plus ça change

We wake up this morning to a very different political situation in Spain with the “Socialist” party having suffered a swingeing defeat at the hands of an electorate which desired to inflict punishment on the ruling party for the financial crisis and the catastrophically high rate of unemployment.  They have voted, however, for PP – a party even more mired in corruption than most of the others.  This PP is a right wing party and its leader is a modern day Pontius Pilate washing his hands as each question about corruption by droves of his Hench people in power up and down Spain.

God knows the “Socialist” party is hardly clean, but I look towards Rajoy as leader of this country with undisguised horror – though one has to admit that his eyebrows are less startling than those of the present incumbent!

The (illegal) demonstrations continue in the major squares of Madrid and Barcelona and, while I appreciate the genuine feeling of those people who are faced with a future without work, there is little sense of a coherent policy to ameliorate the situation.  Opposition is healthy, but what do protesters actually want – apart from the wholly understandable desire to have the dignity of employment and at least a partially assured future in difficult times.

The municipal election results are a clear indication that next year in the general election there will be a change of government.  PP is not friend of the working person but that never stops turkeys voting for Christmas - and providing the trimmings too!

If Toni stays in Terrassa today then I have plans for the house.  There is something about tidying which is intensely satisfying – if only periodically in my case.

The Third Floor is a case in point.  The Terrace is clear apart from the essentials of loungers, table, chairs and small fridge.  The room into which one departs from the delights of the worshipping of the Aten resembles an almost comically chaotic jumble of hi-tec and low rubbish.  Not actual rubbish you understand, but the flotsam which bobs its way upward in a house until it reaches the top floor.  In British houses this would be the attic, but in our Torre this means the open space on the Third Floor.  There is a cupboard under the eaves, but that is so full that merely opening the doors precipitates an avalanche of biblical proportions!

My excitement this evening after school is to deviate from my homeward course and go, with perfect justification, into a shop.

My shopping soul yearns, of course, for shops in which little blue lights twinkle seductively and brushed metal jostles for place with shiny carapaces of multi-coloured plastic: in other words an electrical shop of useful gadgets.

Such is not, unfortunately, my prime destination.  No, in a manner which is wholly foreign to my innate electronic yearnings I am set to buy a mop.

Having destroyed my hi-tec automatic bleach dispenser type cleaning stick and broken the squeezy part of the bucket and emptied the contents all over the floor – and all of that was within five minutes of starting to clean the bathroom – I now boldly venture forth to purchase the most complex mob and bucket I can find.  I fear that I am destined to an arid search, but the hypermarket I intent to patronize has other and far more interesting sections than mere surface sanitizers.

I do not intend that the purchase of some fluffy ended stick is going to change the attitude I have towards cleaning – which is always one of self-defence.  But I am inclined to contemplate a new regime of tidiness.  This does not mean that all magazines from henceforth will be squared off to the edge of any table that they might be on.  No.  What I do contemplate is a step towards the long delayed sorting out of my library.  There is, at the moment, an unsettling insufficiency of shelf space for the double-stacked nature of some of my bookcases to revert to normality.  It therefore follows that some of the space given over to other things will have to be liberated in the name of culture.

This is where the shredder comes in.  Boxes full of papers look very official and business-like, but they take up valuable shelf space.  When the papers inside are seen to be relating to a past life which no longer needs official documentation then their destruction negate their container and each document box is the equivalent of three of four substantial paperbacks.  The true instigation of the fabled “paperless office” would ensure that all my books would be on open display.  The theory is sound.  What more can I say.

I did buy a mop.  I really did.  And it was on special offer.  Domestic duties can go no further.  Well, I suppose there is the using of the damn thing – but I consider that a domestic affectation too far.

Needless to say the mop was not the first, second, third or even fourth thing that I bought, no indeed.  A small but elegant portable CD player; numerous batteries; metallic looking plastic cutlery; small plastic olive dishes; plastic cocktail forks (no, I don’t know what they are for either, but they were simply too cute not to buy); a plastic shower curtain which matches the splash-back – just the normal things you would expect to buy before purchasing a mop in fact.

Examination overload is threatening to overwhelm with external and internal examinations crashing together in a cataclysm of frantic posturing.  We also have the endless meetings to anticipate with boredom so crushing that it is positively palpable. 

But the end, please god, is almost in sight.  At least of this month.  And that is something.  Not much.  But something.